Through our forecast period, the HCM applications market is expected to reach $23.5 billion by 2022, compared with $20.3 billion in 2017 at a compound annual growth rate of 3%.

Through our forecast period, the Core HR applications market, which is comprised of nine subsegments, is expected to reach $14.2 billion by 2022, compared with $12.2 billion in 2017 expanding at a compound annual growth rate of 3.1%. For Top 10 vendors in each of the nine subsegments, please check their own index page by following their link below.

Through our forecast period, the Talent Acquisition applications market, which is comprised of six subsegments, is expected to reach $5.7 billion by 2022, compared with $4.8 billion in 2017 expanding at a compound annual growth rate of 3.4%. For Top 10 vendors in each of the six subsegments, please check their own index page by following their link below.

Through our forecast period, the Workforce Management applications market, which is comprised of six subsegments, is expected to reach $3.5 billion by 2022, compared with $2.9 billion in 2017 expanding at a compound annual growth rate of 3.6%. For Top 10 vendors in each of the six subsegments, please check their own index page by following their link below.

Our HCM Top 500 research team also tracks Time Clock Hardware vendors separately by zeroing in on their embedded software as well as their extensive use of OEM and distribution partners.

Top 10 Task Management Software Vendors

These top 10 software vendors are ranked by their latest annual product revenues attributable to Task Management market segment. Check the methodology section below as well as our FAQ section on how we conduct research for these market reports.

Number of SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central customers for Cloud Core HR applications exceeded 3,000 in 2018, up from 2,300 in 2017. Employee Central has gone live on the SAP HANA database among a number of key accounts including SAP itself.

Oracle’s ERP and HCM applications reaches annualized SaaS revenues of $2.6 billion, up more than 25%. Oracle also acquired Iridize for personalized and contextual user onboarding and training for cloud applications.

Exhibit 4 shows our projections for the HCM enterprise applications market by HCM sub-segment, based on the buying preferences and the customer propensity to invest in new software within those industries as they continue to upgrade and replace many legacy industry-specific applications that have been identified and tracked in our Buyer Insight Database.

As sexual harassment becomes a focal point of social-media conversations, companies may have to step up their internal control measures by investing in new Big Data and social-media monitoring tools in order to respond to such complaints in real time.

HR policies may have to be revamped in order to be better aligned with corporate social responsibilities, putting the interests of shareholders and public opinions ahead of any star performer.

eLearning could be given a boost in 2019 as part of US government tax reform, resulting in more companies like Apple, Disney and others to invest more in education programs for employees.

Succession planning becomes more important than ever to ensure smooth transitioning from one corporate reporting structure to the next.

Companies, especially those that operate in multiple countries, are searching for a system of record to minimize attrition, groom talented employees, while addressing complicated compliance requirements.

Digital transformation in response to new user demands, market forces.

Inhibitors include the following trends that cut across multiple Core HR segments:

Rise of robotic process automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning poses challenges for HR executives as hiring and firing decisions may include unintended biases when screening and selecting job applicants or redundancies because of flawed metrics, algorithms and even job descriptions.

For eLearning vendors, expanding a content library is a challenge. The same applies to fending off the ubiquity of Youtube and Lynda from LinkedIn. The issue is whether users are better off with courseware or do-it-yourself microlearning development tools.

The move toward continuous, ad-hoc and spontaneous feedback process will entail micro services that assimilate project management and team collaboration, requiring HR performance management apps vendors to combine personalized evaluation and unstructured communication. The challenge is to deliver tangible benefits for small work groups, while still using the same metrics to drive process improvement for the entire organization.

The push to have continuous feedback and performance management could redefine corporate hierarchy as line managers and team members alike are calling for greater transparency, collaboration and better metrics to evaluate and improve one’s career path, while achieving work-life balance that adapts to the changing demographics.

The bottom line is that individual performance will have to be measured as much as that of the team. Similar to any successful software development, small teams are more effective than large and matrix-reporting hierarchies.

In other words, companies may be better off investing in tools that put more emphasis on team performance than what an individual can bring to the table. With the advent of telecommuting, much of the work is handled by small teams that spread around the world.

The stakes are much higher to sustain a team’s performance by leveraging tools that ensure smooth handoff of project milestones and deliverables from one person to another and even from one day to the next. Communication is the key, so is accountability and trust in the system. All these would require team members to share the workload as well as the reward, recognition and team-wide compensation.

Learning may well be the glue that binds together performance, compensation and competency management, delivering short tutorials and training videos on general topics and industry-specific subjects as in ViDesktop for legal and Arcoro for construction.

For many learning apps vendors, expanding a content library is a challenge. The same applies to fending off the ubiquity of Youtube and Lynda from LinkedIn.

All major HCM vendors including SAP, Infor and Workday have set their sight on Learning as one of their key areas of growth for 2019. The issue is whether users are better off with courseware, do-it-yourself microlearning development tools, or something perhaps more structured and extensible from HCM suite vendors. Another issue is whether the current crop of learning vendors are able to meet training requirements for new jobs like biofuels energy traders or drone operators that barely existed a few years ago.

Drivers behind the growth of Talent Acquisition applications market include

The onslaught of Google Hire for recruiting, Workplace by Facebook for org-charting and team collaboration, and the addition of LinkedIn to Microsoft’s evolving talent acquisition strategy is a mixed blessing for HCM vendors, resulting in heightened competition as well as partnerships(LinkedIn investing in Cornerstone On Demand). It raises the specter of whether the tech giants will redefine talent acquisition by leveraging their ability to influence billions of users thus expanding the market, or simply using their branding and pricing power to squeeze smaller players.

The prevalence of contingent labor management, which has extended from hourly, seasonal and low-skill contract workers to experienced contractors, could retreat as HR executives grapple with issues such as job insecurity, sluggish wage growth and globalization backlash.

By releasing more detailed reports on use of contingent labor management, companies could benefit from greater transparency.

Contingent labor management vendors will be well served to document successful transfers of statuses from contingent labor to full time employment. Similarly, any increased demand in the use of contractors should be a harbinger of a more robust economy, resulting in a more balanced and productive workforce.

Aging population, coupled with increased emphasis on work-life balance, will continue to pose challenges for employers and recruiters.

Social recruiting, video interviews and innovative ways to brand a workplace have resonated with a new generation of employees as well as recruiters aiming to take their high-volume recruitment efforts to the mobile generation.

Digital transformation in response to new user demands, market forces.

Restructuring of HR processes to accelerate for next decade.

Heavily modified recruiting systems entail rising costs.

Inhibitors include the following trends that cut across multiple Talent Acquisition segments:

Rise of robotic process automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning poses challenges for HR executives as hiring and firing decisions may include unintended biases when screening and selecting job applicants or redundancies because of flawed metrics, algorithms and even job descriptions.

Employer branding may fall short of expectations on the parts of recruiters and candidates.

Scaling out marketing offerings to enable employers to communicate with salaried and hourly workers across multiple platforms – text, video, chat, email – will be key to long-term success.

Expansion by Recruit Holdings and CareerBuilder, which own some of the biggest job boards, could render some Talent Acquisition vendors less relevant.

Any change to LinkedIn by its new owner Microsoft to rope off more resume content could have considerable ramifications for the Talent Acquisition market.

On the buyer side, customers are investing in HCM applications based on new features and capabilities that are expected to replace their existing legacy systems. In many cases, competitive upgrades and replacements that could have a profound impact on future market-share changes will become more widespread.

Since 2010, our global team of researchers have been studying the patterns of the latest HCM software purchases by customers around the world, aggregating massive amounts of data points that form the basis of our forecast assumptions and perhaps the rise and fall of certain vendors and their products on a quarterly basis.

What follows is a sample of our latest findings, which are being updated continuously. Each year our research team identifies tens of thousands of these HCM customer wins and losses from public and proprietary sources.

Further Readings

The HCM Top 500 report series covers more than 3,000 pages of content, make sure you don’t miss any of the 500+ profiles by becoming a subscriber. Or you can catch the highlights with the following links:

Methodology

Similar to any of the hundreds of reports that we have published since 2010, HCM Top 500 is a labor of love. Since 2013, our team of researchers have been conducting rigorous research on thousands of HCM vendors, surveying them quarterly, reviewing their products at even shorter intervals because of the compressed Cloud release cycle, and discussing HR vision with their customers to better understand user needs as well as different paths to upgrade and replace their existing systems.

Each year we also attend many industry-wide and vendor-specific user conferences – HR Tech, Dreamforce, SAPPHIRENOW, Oracle Open World, just to name a few, to gauge what customers are looking for.

Throughout this process comes a rich database of more than 2,000 HCM vendors as well as over 50,000 HCM customers that have been touched one form or another through regular surveys, phone and in-person interviews, email exchanges, and social media interactions, etc.

On a proactively basis, we contact the vendors directly to tabulate their latest quarterly and annual revenues by HCM segment, vertical market, revenue type, region, country and customer size.

We supplement their written responses with our own primary research to determine quarterly and yearly growth rates in each of the 22 segments and 21 verticals, in addition to customer wins to ascertain whether these are net new purchases or expansions of existing implementations.

Another dimension of our quantitative research process is through continuous improvement of our customer database, which stores more than one million records on the enterprise software landscape of over 100,000 organizations around the world.

The database provides customer insight and contextual information on what types of HCM, enterprise software systems and other relevant technologies are they running and their propensity to invest further with their current or new suppliers as part of their overall HCM and IT transformation projects to stay competitive, fend off threats from disruptive forces, or comply with internal mandates to improve overall enterprise efficiency.

The result is a combination of supply-side data and demand-generation customer insight that allows our clients to better position themselves in anticipation of the next wave that will reshape the HCM marketplace for years to come.

HR performance management applications are designed to automate the aggregation and delivery of information pertinent to the linking of job roles and the mission and goals of the organization. More specifically, the system allows users to automate the performance review process by using mechanisms such as training and key performance indicators to continuously track and monitor the progress of an individual employee, work team, and division. Some of the key features include: Assessment of individual career objectives and organizational skills gaps that impede performance and job advancement. Continuous reviews and establishing milestones. 360-degree evaluation and real-time feedback. Performance appraisal automation. Goal setting and tracking. Employee surveys. Alignment of human assets to corporate objectives. Fast tracks for top performers.

Learning management systems refer to applications that automate the administration, tracking, and reporting of training events. Other tools may include courseware and other delivery, management, tracking, or integrated solutions whose focus is on the learning environment, including learning content management systems. Career development tools include apps for coaching, mentoring, employee development planning, and diagnosing of development needs.

Recruiting applications are designed to automate the recruitment process of salaried and hourly employees through screening and skills assessment, as well as automated selection processes to improve hiring pipeline by identifying talent inside or outside the organization. Other key features include: Manage skills inventories. Create and manage job requisitions. Coordinate team collaboration within hiring processes. Video Interviewing, team building and digital coaching.

Applications designed to attract and engage candidates and employees. Other tasks automate functions such as candidate relationship management apps, career site technology, social recruiting, employee referrals, branding, video engagement, campus recruiting and internal hiring

Facilitate resource planning for staffing firms as well as vendor managed system, allowing for front office integration for employment agencies as well as talent acquisition apps designed for staffing firms.

Workforce Management

Absence management applications offer automated features to support employee leave management, employer authorized leave, Short-Term-Disability/Workers’ Comp coordination, federal and state compliance, customized leave correspondence, medical certification processing, insurance premium payment tracking as well as employee self-service capabilities. Leave Management supports compliance activities related to government regulations such as the Family and Medical Leave Act in the United States and other local leave laws in different countries.

Fatigue Management apps help automate key facets of fatigue risk mitigation, enforcing employee work-hour limits and aligning with fitness for duty best practices. Similar apps may act as electronic work diaries for real-time reporting and compliance with transportation laws.

Products are designed to Increase forecasting accuracy by factoring in a variety of methods and historical patterns. Create optimal schedules to meet customer demands, while reducing costs and maximizing resources

Task Management offers labor management capabilities such as task-based and project-based activity tracking as well as measurement and reporting functions against performance standards like engineered labor standards, team standards and reflective standards.

Time and Attendance applications are designed to automate employee time tracking in different locations, help reduce overtime expenses, improve payroll accuracy, eliminate pay errors and adjustments, along with the need to simplify and optimize administrative tasks and complex rate calculations by making available accurate and current labor data and full audit trail of payroll data.